This page last modified: Oct 13 2008
title:Perl one liners
description:Perl one line scripts run from the command line or used in piped commands in the shell.
keywords:perl,regexp,regex,regular,expression,sed,awk,bash,sh
See man perlrun.
Necessary command line switches
-------------------------------
-e commandline is execute commandline as Perl
-n is loop through the input, no printing of the input lines
-p is loop through the input, print the input lines as well as any ouput.
Since -e has an argument commandline, you cannot say
-ep commandline
That would be interpreted as
-e -p commandline
and since -p has no argument, the commandline would be ignored. I suggest one of the following forms:
perl -ne commandline
perl -pe commandline
Example 0.1
-----------
Simply pring "hello world\n". Note that the Perl command is surrounded
by single quote characters (aka tick). If you need to use a single
tick inside the Perl command, you might try using the octal \047.
perl -e 'print "hello world\n"';
Example 0.2
-----------
Print the name of every file in the current directory. The actual act
of printing here is clearly redundant, but it gives a nice, simple
example of getting input from stdin, and printing it.
ls | perl -ne 'chomp; print "$_\n"'
ls | perl -ne 'print "$_"'
Example 1.0
-----------
Use "find" to exec the "file" command and use a perl one line script
to print the file name which chmod uses (via the backticked "find"
command) to make the file permissions +x. Note that "find" is inside
backticks. The Perl oneliner is in a single quoted (aka tick) string
which contains a print statement with a double quoted string.
chmod -v +x `find ./ -exec file {} \; | grep executable | perl -ne 'm/^(.*?):/; print "$1\n" ' `
Example 1.1
-----------
The "grep executable" could be moved into the Perl regex as well, but
then the regex must be wrapped in a if statement to prevent $1 from
printing for every line of input. The regex is slightly more complex
than the example above. Remember, $1 retains its value between
iterations.
chmod -v +x `find ./ -exec file {} \; | perl -ne 'if (m/^(.*?):.*executable/){ print "$1\n"; } '`
Example 1.2
-----------
There is also the tr command (not Perl, but sometimes handy):
Here are rot13 and un-rot13 examples:
tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m < good.txt > gibberish.txt
tr N-ZA-Mn-za-m A-Za-z < gibberish.txt > good.txt
Example 1.3
-----------
Oddly, the command below works, due to the DWIMish nature of Perl (DWIM = Do What I
Mean). Or due to the fact that every line of the file c040721c03.txt
has one and only one match.
cat txt_files/c040721c03.txt | perl -ne 'm/\s+([A-Z\*\?]+)\s+/; print "$1\n" '
This is probably robust.
cat txt_files/c040721c03.txt | perl -ne 'if (m/\t+([A-Z\*\?]+)\s+/s) { print ".$1.\n"} ' | less
The variante below is interesting since it will search for "peptide-like" strings multiple times per line.
It finds all kinds of garbage.
cat txt_files/c040721c03.txt | perl -ne 'while (m/\s+([A-Z\*\?]+)\s+/g) { print ".$1.\n"} ' | less
Example 1.4
-----------
# Use the e switch at the end of the regex to eval the right side of the regex.
# The eval is necessary when using a Perl function as below
cat oldfile | perl -pe 's/(\d+)_/sprintf("%2.2d_",$1)/e' > newfile
Example 1.5
-----------
# A simple example that changes /session_lib to /geoss_session_lib throughout a file.
# This is a double bash command, and the second half renames the .new file.
# To make this work over multiple files I created a text file of shell commands
# using Emacs macros. It's crude but simpler than trying to get some combination of "find" and "xargs"
# to do it in a single bash command. I use "find" to generate the original list of files
# that I modify with the Emacs macro.
cat ./bin/geoss_adduser.pl | perl -pe 's/\/session_lib/\/geoss_session_lib/' > ./bin/geoss_adduser.pl.new; mv ./bin/geoss_adduser.pl.new ./bin/geoss_adduser.pl
Example 1.6
-----------
# A related utility is xargs.
egrep -ho "http://.*a.jpg" file*.html | xargs wget
Example 1.7 (and variants)
--------------------------
# test regex 04-01* to 02-22* before calling with rename()
find -exec perl -e '$new=$ARGV[0]; $new =~ s/.\/04\-01(.*)/02\-22$1/; print "$new\n";' {} \;
# Another test, and alternate implementation
find -exec perl -e '$ARGV[0] =~ m/.\/04\-01(.*)/; print "02\-22$1\n"; ' {} \;
# regex rename 02-22* 04-01* and visa-versa.
find -exec perl -e '$new=$ARGV[0]; $new =~ s/.\/02\-22(.*)/04\-01$1/; rename($ARGV[0],$new);' {} \;
find -exec perl -e '$new=$ARGV[0]; $new =~ s/.\/04\-01(.*)/02\-22$1/; rename($ARGV[0],$new);' {} \;
# regex rename 02-22* to "04-01*"
find -exec perl -e '$new=$ARGV[0]; $new =~ s/.\/02\-22(.*)/\"04\-01$1\"/; rename($ARGV[0],$new);' {} \;
# regex rename "*" to *
find -exec perl -e '$new=$ARGV[0]; $new =~ s/\"//g; rename($ARGV[0],$new);' {} \;
Example 2.0
------------
Jim Roberts contributed this example using the PostgreSQL command
line. For a given table in the database, it creates a list of tmpl_var
comment tags for use by Perl's HTML::Template. Assume that example.edu
has a Postgres server, a database called "bioinfo", and bioinfo has a
table called "bio_sequence". When running this example, if you don't
have a .pgpass file, you'll have to enter the db password.
This is "smart guy" Perl using several tricks and short
cuts. Personally, while I can read this kind of code, even as an
experienced Perl programmer I find it somewhat hard to read. If you
are not experienced in Perl, this may be hard to interpret. (As an
aside, I would encourage everyone to avoid the Perl predefined
variables as much as possible in the interest of legibility and bug
free code. We should probably also avoid tricks like arrays assigned
in a scalar context. Docs about the predefined variables can be found
in man perlvar.)
echo '\d bio_sequence' | psql -h example.edu -Ubioinfo | perl -ne 'next if m/Column/; $nos= $_ =~ tr/\|/\|/; if ($nos==2) { m/(.*?)\|/; $c=$1; $c =~ s/ //g; print "<!-- tmpl_var name=$c -->\n"; }' >tmpl_names